rcconf: Enjoying the nostalgia

rcconf reminds me of the good old days when I was hell-bent on eking every gram of speed out of the Golden Age of Ubuntu. (Yes, I refer to pre-2010 Ubuntu releases as its “Golden Age.” Get used to it.👿 )

In short, this is a text-only interface to manage runlevels on a Debian-based machine. As you can see above, there are quite a few at work on a default installation.

In theory, disabling a few of these should result in a perkier system. The underlying theory being, the less extraneous services, the less time the processor spends skipping over the clutter of unused processes. Add them all up and they might make a difference to you.

All that is strictly theory from my perspective though. And given that machines these days barely lose any time to teeny unused processes, it might not make a difference at all.

On the other hand, if you’re working with the hardware of the last decade, you’ll probably want to give this a chance.

For what it’s worth, it’s important to make a distinction between Debian’s rcconf and sysv-rc-conf. One manages runlevels and one the SysV startup; I’ll gloss over sysv-rc-conf in the S section.

About two years from now, probably.😯🙄

P.S.: If you’re an Arch user and you’re wondering why you can’t find this in the repos, it’s because this is for Debian only. Don’t feel bad. You’ve got some fun stuff to play with too. …